Hi all, (First post, so, greetings!)

I'm having some trouble with redirection in bash.

I'm trying to redirect stderr to a file, then later redirect stderr to a different file. I thought this was just a case of (re)redirecting the filehandle 2 to the new file, but it seems I've misunderstood.

Here's a code sample showing what I'm trying to do:



###############################
####The main script (local)####
###############################

#!/bin/bash

CONNECT1="user@machine"
CONNECT2="user@machine2"

ssh $CONNECT1<<MYEND 2> ~/output-machine1
/tmp/remote-script
MYEND

ssh $CONNECT2<<MYEND 2> ~/output-machine2
/tmp/remote-script
MYEND




#######################
#### remote-script ####
#######################

#!/bin/bash

# get some output to stdout (/tmp/jaziniho does exist)
ls /tmp/jaziniho

# get some output to stderr
ls /does/not/exist



Output I get back:

to stdout:
first the list of files in /tmp/jaziniho on machine1
second the list of files in /tmp/jaziniho on machine2

for redirected stderr:
$cat output-machine1
ls: /does/not/exist: No such file or directory

However, file output-machine2 is never created, the output from stderr for the second machine is lost.

Can anyone explain what's wrong?

I don't see any obvious issues so it leads me to believe you are not getting any errors on the CONNECT2. Have you done a side by side comparison of /tmp/remote-script on machine and machine2? If you accidentally left out the "ls /does/not/exist" on the latter's remote-script it might not be producing errors. (Or if you had create /does/not/exist on machine2 earlier it might be that the ls is working.)

That is to say you're assuming there is an error and perhaps there isn't one.

*sigh*

I found a typo in my simplified test script, it actually worked in reality. (both were redirecting to output-machine1)

as for the real world version, I found a redirect to /dev/null buried deep in the heart of it.

sorry! thanks for taking the time and interest nonetheless.